


The Ones we Left Behind

by ectoBisexual



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Drabble, F/F, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-22
Updated: 2015-10-22
Packaged: 2018-04-27 13:16:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5050024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ectoBisexual/pseuds/ectoBisexual
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This girl of yours is wrecked, but you’ll do anything for her. You’d die a million times over if it meant saving her again.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Chloe has survivor’s guilt, and Max is left to deal with the wreckage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ones we Left Behind

She does this every morning.

It’s the process of coming to terms with what surrounds you. Like a baby opening its eyes for the first time. You’ve read about this: psychomotor retardation, or one of the other elaborately debilitating disorders that comes gift bow-wrapped with depression. Chloe is curled up in a stupor on the hood of the car, pretending like she is thinking when really you know she is just staring at the coast and wishing she was buried five miles under it. You’re used to this. You can get used to anything, with time. You could probably get used to it if she woke you up every morning by stabbing you, too.

Morning ritual. You climb out of the car and round the side of it to go greet her. She pricks her head up when you approach, pulled from a daze like something from the water, dazed and sea-sick. She blinks at you all slow and doe-eyed and tries to smile, the edges of it stretching over her teeth. She’s trying to be brave, but it reminds you of a wild animal. That feral, lost look in her eyes.

“Good morning,” you say anyway, smiling back because you both like to pretend it doesn’t hurt.

The skittishness she’s had lately. Jumping at the smallest noises. This girl of yours is wrecked, but you’ll do anything for her.

“How far do you think we’ve gone?”

She asks you this every morning, too. So far you’ve booked it so far from Arcadia Bay that no one could figure that was where you’re from; that was the plan, anyway. Then you just kept driving, right along the coast so the two of you can always see the ocean and pretend it doesn’t remind you of home. The smell of salt makes you sick. Bile crawls up your throat. Have they found bodies? Identified them? Do they think the two of you are missing, or are you just presumed dead like everyone else?

Does anyone even know who you are, enough to look for you?

“You should call your parents,” Chloe says, reciting it like a line.

“I will.”

“Today, Mad Max. You know they’re worried. Probably already planned your funeral. You can jump out of a bush and scare them, like, surprise! Ghost Max 2.0.”

“Stop it,” you say, and Chloe shuts up. She pulls at the laces of her shoes to hide the fact that her hands are shaking, draws her knees to her chest. You know it’s coming. Maybe not yet. Maybe she’ll wait longer today, and you’ll have some downtime before the blow and the storm.

“Well,” she says, hopping down from the hood of the car and shaking her hair. It’s a little matted; cheap shampoo and truck stop showers will do that to you. Her roots have come in at full blast, lighting the top of her head like a sunset. “I’m starving. Let’s see if we can’t forage some breakfast, huh?”

“I think there’s a McDonald’s not far from here, Bear Grills.” You’re smiling despite yourself, and it’s fondness you can’t shake, settling warm and sticky in your chest. Choking you.

You get in the car and drive.

Wait long enough, and the ocean becomes a part of you. The tide beating at your chest. That rotting smell of seaweed that went with Arcadia Bay like a sidekick, clinging onto it and everywhere you moved. You try, you try—everything you do is scrabbling for purchase now, trying to hold on.

It has been three months.

She doesn’t know that you’ve gone back. You were too scared to try, for the first month. The second, when she started talking about going back—about finding some way to go back, a photograph, or anything—you got scared and had to try. You waited until she was asleep and you were shaking, stomach tight, nerves so wound you had to throw up in a bush before you could stomach the dizziness that always came with rewinding. Chloe doesn’t know about the folded up picture you keep in your back pocket, Kate and yourself grinning lopsidedly into the camera. Sometimes you go back just to walk to Chloe’s house and watch her; it isn’t creepy. You just want to see her being happy, or not happy, arguing with her mom in the kitchen like everything is normal. Other times you go just to talk to Kate, to brave the ten minutes you can stand it and see how long you can keep from crying. It’s never very long, anyway.

Chloe returns to the car with a greasy paper bag of breakfast food and startles you so badly you kick the dashboard. She smiles at you. It lights your heart up, but makes everything hurt, too.

“Ready?” she says. You’re always ready. That’s the only thing you’re good at anymore.

.

Chloe buys the cheapest bottle of Vodka they sell at some corner store that smells like cobwebs and decay. You’re running out of money, you both know it, and you’ve been talking more and more about getting a job lately. She wants you to call your parents. If you do that, they’ll want you to come home, and you know Chloe wants that, too. She thinks that if you see your parents again then maybe you’ll realise you’ve made the wrong choice, and you’ll want to go back, change things. Plenty of pictures there. Your head throbs, thinking about it.

The sky is the colour of diluted blood. That means it’s going to be hot tomorrow, you tell Chloe, but she has already started drinking. Her eyes blink at you like a doll’s might, broken and slow moving.

“It happened again yesterday, didn’t it?”

“Yes.” You don’t lie. You never lie. “Only for a bit. I jumped a few hours. No big deal.”

“Why?”

Time keeps fucking you both up, you think: that’s why. She’s referring to the time jumps; you lose an hour, gain an hour, fall back a few days and then accidentally find yourself at next week before waking up in the present to Chloe pulled over on the side of the road and shaking you. You’re both worried you’ll crash one day because of it. It happens more and more frequently these days, these numbered, lessening days, that you wouldn’t be surprised. Chloe’s got a death wish; you’d die a million times over if it meant saving her again.

“Why what? Why isn’t it a big deal?”

“Why don’t you just go back?” It’s happening. She’s drunk; you brace yourself. You hear the fury in her voice, and the begging. You want to reach out and hold her hands. You want to shake her until she stops.

“No,” you answer, clipped, because there is no point in reasoning with her, not when it will only make her cry. Chloe’s not religious but she prays sometimes, for her mom or Rachel or you, maybe, because she has this insane idea that in saving her you somehow ruined your own life. You know this isn’t true, but you can’t convince her, either. Everything is a self-destructive wreck with Chloe.

“It’s gonna keep happening. Shit. You wanna just keep running from time, Max? When has that ever worked out for us?”

“Even if I wanted to change things, it’s too late. I threw away the picture,” you say. You know you are grasping at straws, but you’ll do anything. Anything to keep her here, keep her around, with you.

You don’t jump at her voice anymore. That’s the only thing you’re used to, the harsh bite of it and the lilt. It never shakes, even when her hands are trembling so badly she has to place them in firm fists at her sides. There is an air of vulnerability to it; you know she’s feeling particularly afraid when she gets angry at you, directs all that fire and ash your way. You don’t mind sometimes. It’s good just to hear her shout, to see her pace and kick things. You love that anger so, so much, because it means she hasn’t given up, that she’s still burning inside. Some nights you yell back.

Some nights you hold her so gently that neither of you know what to do with yourselves.

You have to clean her up, have to screw the cap back on the bottle and put it under the seat in the back so that it doesn’t spill lest you waste more money. Tonight she shakes in your arms, this hurricane of a girl, and begs you in a slurred rush to _let me die, let me die, let me die._ You rock her and shush her and pretend you’re not crying. It won’t be good for either of you.

So when she looks up you kiss her, the corner of her mouth and then her lips, letting all the weight of time and space fill you both up like balloons. You rise, and rise, over the weight of this world, holding her hand tightly in both of yours so that the feeling of falling goes away.

You can’t keep running from time.

That’s what she said. She’s never said it like that before.

But it doesn’t matter; you made your choice. You’ll wake up tomorrow, and do this all again.


End file.
